Small low power computing devices such as wearable devices and sensors are constrained by their battery capacity. These low power devices need to support standard wireless communications technologies such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth (BT) to connect to other computing devices (for example, a smartphone or other such device) and exchange data. Such support is problematic because standard wireless communications technologies consume significant power. It is critical to minimize energy consumption of the communications block of low power devices.
One strategy to minimize energy consumption may be to power off the communications block of a low power device as often as possible while maintaining data transmission and reception without increasing latency significantly. The low power device might power on the communications block only when there is data to receive and/or transmit, by waking up just before data reception/transmission, receiving and/or transmitting data, and powering off for the rest of the time.
However, this strategy introduces new problems, such as when and how to wake up the device when there is data to be received or transmitted. Further, such a solution to these new problems may cause issues with legacy devices, that is, those devices which were not designed for a network with low power devices.